The only crude note was sounded by a pair of Staffordshire foxes, garish orange creatures, each of which had a dead rabbit drooping in its jaws. She had picked them up in Portobello Road for next to nothing years ago. They had made her think of Fox Corner.
‘I love coming here,’ Sarah said. ‘You have such nice things and it’s always so clean and tidy, nothing like home.’
‘You can afford to be clean and tidy when you live on your own,’ Ursula said, but flattered by the compliment. She supposed she should make a will, leave her worldly goods to someone. She would like Sarah to have the flat but the memory of the debacle over Fox Corner when Sylvie died made her hesitate. Should one show such outright favouritism? Possibly not. She must divide her estate between all seven of her nieces and nephews, even the ones she didn’t like or never saw. Jimmy, of course, had never married or had children. He lived in California now. ‘He’s a homosexual, you do know that, don’t you?’ Pamela said. ‘He’s always had those proclivities.’ It was information, not censure, but there was still a mild prurience in her words and the faintest trace of smugness, as if she were better able to cope with liberal views. Ursula wondered if she knew about Gerald and his ‘proclivities’.
‘Jimmy’s just Jimmy,’ she said.
The previous week, she had come back from lunch and found a copy of The Times sitting on her desk. It had been neatly folded so that only the obituaries were on show. Crighton’s had a photograph of him in uniform, taken before she knew him. She had forgotten how handsome he was. It was quite a big piece, mentioned Jutland, of course. She learned that his wife Moira had ‘predeceased’ him, that he was a grandfather several times over and a keen golfer. He had always hated golf, she wondered when his conversion had taken place. And who on earth had left The Times on her desk? Who all these years later would have thought to tell her? She had no idea and supposed she never would now. There was a time during their affair, when he had been in the habit of leaving notes on her desk, rather smutty little billets-doux that appeared as if by magic. Perhaps the same invisible hand had delivered The Times, all these years later.
‘The Man from the Admiralty is dead,’ she said to Pamela. ‘Of course, everyone dies eventually.’
‘Well, now there’s a truism,’ Pamela laughed.
‘No, I mean, everybody one has ever known, including oneself, will be dead one day.’
‘Still a truism.’
‘Amor fati,’ Ursula said. ‘Nietzsche wrote about it all the time. I didn’t understand, I thought it was “a more fatty”. Do you remember I used to see a psychiatrist? Dr Kellet? He was a philosopher at heart.’
‘Love of fate?’
‘It means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced, I suppose.’
‘Sounds like Buddhism. Did I tell you that Chris is going to India, to some kind of monastery, a retreat, he calls it. He’s found it hard to settle to anything since Oxford. He’s a “hippie” apparently.’ Ursula thought Pamela was very indulgent with her third son. She found Christopher rather creepy. She tried to think of another, more generous word but failed. He was one of those people who stared at you with a meaningful smile on their face, as if he was somehow intellectually and spiritually superior, when the fact was he was simply socially inept.
The scent of the lilies, lovely when they had first gone in water, was beginning to make her feel slightly sick. The room was stuffy. She should open a window. She stood up in order to carry her plate through to the kitchen and was immediately struck by a blinding pain in her right temple. She had to sit down again and wait for it to pass. She had been getting these pains for weeks now. An acute pain and then a thick, buzzy head. Or sometimes just a straightforward horrible pounding ache. She thought it might be high blood pressure but, after a battery of tests, the hospital’s verdict was neuralgia, ‘probably’. She was given strong painkillers and told that she was bound to feel better once she had retired. ‘You’ll have time to relax, take it easy,’ the doctor said in the special tone of voice reserved for the elderly.
The pain passed and she stood up, gingerly.
What would she do with her time? She wondered about moving to the country, a little cottage, partaking in village life, perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of Pamela. She imagined St Mary Mead, or Miss Read’s Fairacre. Perhaps she could write a novel? It would certainly fill in the time. And a dog, time to get another dog. Pamela kept Golden Retrievers, a succession of them, one replacing another and quite indistinguishable to Ursula’s eye.
She washed up her meagre pots. Thought she might have an early night, make some Ovaltine and take her book to bed with her. She was reading Greene’s The Comedians. Perhaps she did need to rest more but lately she had become rather afraid of sleep. She was having such vivid dreams that sometimes she found it hard to accept that they weren’t real. Several times recently she had believed that something outlandish had really happened to her when it quite obviously, logically, had not. And falling. She was always falling in her dreams, down staircases and off cliffs, it was a most unpleasant sensation. Was this the first sign of dementia? The beginning of the end. The end of the beginning.
From her bedroom window she could see a fat moon rising. Keats’s Queen-Moon, she thought. Tender is the night. The pain in her head came back. She ran a glass of water from the tap and swallowed a couple of painkillers.
‘But if Hitler had been killed, before he became Chancellor, it would have stopped all this conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis, wouldn’t it?’ The Six-Day War, as they had called it, had ended, the Israelis decisively victorious. ‘I mean, I do understand why the Jews wanted to create an independent state and defend it vigorously,’ Ursula continued, ‘and I always felt sympathy for the Zionist cause, even before the war, but, on the other hand, I can also understand why the Arab states are so aggrieved. But if Hitler had been unable to implement the Holocaust—’
‘Because he was dead?’
‘Yes, because he was dead. Then support for a Jewish homeland would have been weak at best …’
‘History is all about “what ifs”,’ Nigel said. Pamela’s first-born, her favourite nephew, was a history tutor at Brasenose, Hugh’s old college. She was treating him to lunch in Fortnum’s.
‘It is nice to have an intelligent conversation with someone,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on holiday in the south of France with my friend Millie Shawcross, have you met her? No? Not that she’s called that any more, she’s been through several husbands, each one wealthier than the last.’
Millie, the war bride, had hotfooted it back from America just as soon as she could, her new family were ‘cowpokes’, she reported. She had gone back to ‘treading the boards’ and had several disastrous relationships before she struck gold in the form of the scion of an oil family in tax exile.
‘She lives in Monaco. It’s incredibly small, I had no idea. She’s really quite stupid these days. I’m wittering, aren’t I?’
‘Not at all. Shall I pour you some water?’